THEATER REVIEW

THEATER REVIEW;Of Nixon and Kissinger: What Might Have Been

By VINCENT CANBY

Published: March 13, 1996

There's a briefly introspective moment in Russell Lees's entertaining "Nixon's Nixon," when Richard M. Nixon (Gerry Bammon) and Henry A. Kissinger (Steve Mellor) consider how far they've come from their humble origins. It's late on the night of Aug. 7, 1974. The place is the Lincoln Sitting Room in the White House and both men have had a lot to drink. Facing impeachment, the President of the United States is being urged by his Secretary of State to bite the bullet and resign. Nixon refuses to make a decision. Kissinger is worried about his own future.

"Sometimes I stare in the mirror," Kissinger muses. "What's happening behind those eyes? I'm astonished. Mystified." There's a pause. He adds, "I like it." Nixon admits that although he doesn't often stare in the mirror now, he did on the way up. He not only stared, but also talked to himself: " 'You sly dog,' I'd say. And we'd share a secret smile. But then I fell. I fell like Satan tossed from heaven."

It's the great American story," Kissinger says benignly, as if to soothe. "Requited ambition." Which prompts Nixon to suggest that maybe one should commit suicide when one's at the top, before triumph turns to tragedy. "There's the catch," the President points out with brow furrowed. "You don't know when to kill yourself until it's too late."

This is the stuff of Mr. Lees's blissfully funny and sometimes cruel fiction, which opened last night at the Westside Theater, after its limited engagement at the MCC Theater Off Off Broadway.

"Nixon's Nixon" deserves all of the good things you have heard about it and more. It's both a serious work of the imagination and a fully realized political satire of the sort that the American theater seldom sees. It may also be the perfect antidote to Oliver Stone's fancy and flatulent three-hour-plus movie, "Nixon," an upscale docudrama that pretends to deal in facts, a number of which may not be true.

"Nixon's Nixon" makes no such mistake. It's like a jazz riff on contemporary history. It's one playwright's speculation about what went on at a meeting that was closed to all except the two parties involved. There were no flies on the wall of the White House that night. Mr. Lees uses this occasion to create a small, vivid drama that confirms and even humanizes the participants as they are known through their public personalities. The revelations here are not of facts but of fiction that informs.

Jim Simpson has staged the intermissionless 80-minute piece with admirable simplicity and with two splendidly effective actors. As you may have read, Mr. Bamman and Mr. Mellor eschew all padding and putty that might make them look like their real-life counterparts.

At times Mr. Mellor seems to resemble Mr. Kissinger at the age of 30, long before his Washington days, but that seems accidental. The distinctive accent and voice are suggested, not imitated. Mr. Bamman doesn't resemble Mr. Nixon at all, though he has the hand gestures, the facial expressions and the walk. Best of all, both actors have the characters as written by Mr. Lees.

This Nixon is desperate, shrewd, paranoid, utterly baffled by the situation in which he finds himself. As the night of drink and talk, of accusations and reconciliationscontinues, he seems increasingly unable to finish a sentence. His mind is going too fast. No sooner does one thought come into his head than another arrives before he has fully articulated the first. His language is obscene. He also has a gift for the matchlessly inept simile. "Rugs as thick as thieves," he says of the carpeting in Mao Zedong's Imperial City.

Kissinger also disintegrates in his own fashion. He's alternately unctuous and aggressive until Nixon lets on that there are tapes that could bring the Secretary of State down, too. At which point Kissinger begins to see the value of whomping up a small international crisis to keep Nixon in office. The colleagues who initiated the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, opened China and negotiated the end of the Vietnam War are suddenly back in business.

They discuss various "Dr. Strangelove"-like possibilities until they seize on the idea of an incident along the Russian-Chinese border. Says Kissinger: "A provincial mayor gets assassinated sort of thing." They foresee how the crisis will escalate. Kissinger: "We tell both sides what's going to happen." Nixon: "We play 'em like banjos." Kissinger: "It gets tense. Who can prevent world war? Who has the power and prestige and trust of the Soviet Union and China? Who?" Nixon: "Me!"

"Nixon's Nixon" has the brio of a revue sketch constructed with a playwright's appreciation for character. The play doesn't cut deep but it cuts true. Within its short running time, it also manages to touch lightly on most of the major events so laboriously recapitulated in Mr. Stone's fractured film. In its wit and economy, "Nixon's Nixon" recalls Robert Altman's 1985 film, "Secret Honor," adapted from the one-character play about Mr. Nixon by Donald Freed and Arnold M. Stone. That work, too, was pure speculation.

At the time Mr. Nixon left office, who could have foreseen that he would become a figure of such fascination in fiction? Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? Maybe Mr. Lees is right when he has his protagonist announce, "I appeal to the Richard Nixon in everybody."